Experts Spotlight Lasting Innovations From the COVID-19 Pandemic

In a series of interviews, experts highlight lasting health care innovations that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, including telemedicine, artificial intelligence (AI), and home-based treatment.

The featured experts include Jason Bellet, cofounder and chief business officer of Eko Health; Geoffrey Rutledge, MD, PhD, cofounder and chief medical officer of HealthTap; and Dan Nardi, MS, CEO of Reimagine Care.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

Which health care innovations that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic have had the most lasting impact on patient care and outcomes? Which do you see as most promising for continued adoption?

Bellet: COVID-19 showed us the power of telehealth to deliver higher-quality and higher-acuity care to hard-to-reach patients and underserved patients. It's hard to believe how large a force multiplier COVID-19 was in terms of telehealth infrastructure and the percentage of visits that are done over telehealth, but there's no going back.

For those of us who were in the telemedicine business for many years prior to COVID-19 and lobbying and storytelling around the power of reaching these patients through telemedicine visits, COVID-19 offered an opportunity to really demonstrate that. Thank God that the sort of infrastructure and the early investments were made prior to COVID-19 because what it allowed systems to do was to go from 1% or 2% of their visits being done virtually, or 1% to 2% of their patients being monitored remotely, to 30%, 40%, 50% of their visits over COVID-19 happening virtually.

Had they started from scratch, I don't think that would have been possible. Because these large systems have made early investments in their telehealth infrastructure, they're able to just put down the throttle and really turn up the gas.

There's going to be a balance, right? Patients have started to come back to the clinic, things are going to recalibrate. I think for health care overall, as devastating as COVID-19 was, and it was absolutely devastating for providers and patients alike, we were able to demonstrate the power of telemedicine; that was an opportunity that will change medicine forever.

Rutledge: The COVID-19 pandemic led to many lessons. One of the important ones, I think, is how we responded as a nation to the public health emergency that COVID-19 represented. Certainly, I think there are many lessons that we can draw from that, which I'm very hopeful we will use to improve our response to any similar pandemic in the future.

I point out that the thing that the pandemic caused was everyone to discover how virtual health care worked. We were forced to gain access to our doctors by virtual means. Many doctors who were not used to using telehealth were exposed more consistently to giving virtual care to their patients. I think, most importantly, many people discovered through exposure to the virtual care that virtual care can be as effective as it is in connecting them with their doctor.

I guess the last component I would describe is the incredible lessons we learned about how mRNA technology can be rapidly deployed to identify safe and effective vaccines to combat these new threats. It was quite remarkable how once we got the sequence of the virus, which we did very quickly, we were able to manufacture a vaccine that was highly effective and has proven to be safe. The technology itself has been around for more than a decade. We knew that, inherently, the technology worked, but this was the most remarkable demonstration of applying this technology in a way that saved many millions of lives around the world.

It's somewhat unfortunate that there was so much concern and polarization in the messaging around the value and benefit of these vaccines and so much frank misinformation about their application. Even now, looking back on it, we can see very clearly, because we have all of the data now, with perfect hindsight, we can see how effective the vaccines were and how minimal the side effects associated with them were compared with the side effects of getting the infection that it was preventing.

Nardi: I'd say there's a handful, like home-based cancer care, right? The adoption, the comfort level, and the expectation of being able to have high-quality care provided in the home or virtually. I think, as a system, we have traditionally, for decades, just expected patients to come into clinics to get their care. Now, with COVID-19, as a society, we've learned to not only adopt but expect high-quality answers and care at home, on the go. I think that's really one of the best ones.

I also think the introduction of AI. It's not necessarily in COVID-19 itself, but it started to rise to prominence in the middle stages of COVID-19. Again, it goes back to, how do we, as a society, use technology to improve our lives? It's not just asking more and more nurses to be on triage lines to answer these calls or provide this support, but how do we leverage technology to enable their success and to provide a lot of the initial answers and support for patients on the fly? That I think has been extremely important, so I think the combination of those 2 has been super helpful.

I think an opportunity moving forward is combining both of those into this concept to be able to support decentralized clinical trials. There's so much promise with clinical trials, but the hard part is matching the right patients at the right time with the right trial.

I think being able to not only combine the expectation and adoption of home-based care and virtual care with the technology and artificial intelligence, I think we have a real big opportunity in the future to be able to support decentralized clinical trials to ensure we have the highest possible adoption and the right mix of demographics in these patients, and not just kind of have it be clinic by clinic, location by location, which is where we traditionally have been.